" Is the conservative side of politics walking away from the free market?"
Yes definitely; the free market is long gone, it's a thing of the past.
Too much regulation has been imposed on generators by individual State gov'ts and the Federal gov't for generators to possibly compete freely and openly any more.
Don't you have the same restrictions in WA that we have here in VIC, where all the fluky unpredictable unreliable, "wind and solar" generated electricity is now by legislation compelled to be used first ahead of the lower-grade, 'dirty', baseload electricity from coal-fired generators? Thereby forcing the once cheap, reliable, baseload coal-fired operators into extremely costly stop-start operations [long start up times] whenever they're instructed to.
Add to that a 300% increase in royalties in one year on one of the generation sources [I'll let you guess which one Daniel Andrews attacked] and you can see why Hazelwood started to become 'uncommercial'.
But hey it's all the energy generators and industry providers fault of course yet we've seen the likes of Weatherill and Andrews lay the blame on coal-fired generators and it's a waste of time arguing with deceitful liars like them.
